PITTSBURGH— Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon University's Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, has been awarded the IEEE's James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award "for leadership and pioneering contributions to speech recognition, natural language understanding, and machine intelligence." The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established the award in 2002 to honor achievements in all aspects of speech and audio technology.

Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Edmund M. Clarke and two computer scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Grenoble in France, are winners of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award in recognition of their pioneering work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. The method, called Model Checking, is the most widely used technique for detecting and diagnosing errors in complex hardware and software design.

The Robotics Institute is the winner of the Chairman's Award in the 2008 Carnegie Science Awards, a recognition of the institute's role in promoting science and technology in the region.The Entertainment Technology Center won in the information technology category, while Mellon College of Science physicist Tiziana Di Matteo was cited as "emerging female scientist."The 2008 awards, which are sponsored by Eaton Corp., were announced by the Carnegie Science Center at a luncheon for news media on Jan. 31 and will be formally presented at Carnegie Music Hall on May 9.

PITTSBURGH, PA...January 31, 2008— Carnegie Science Center today announced the winners of its 2008 Carnegie Science Awards, sponsored by Eaton Corporation. Carnegie Science Center established the Carnegie Science Awards program in 1997 to recognize and promote outstanding science and technology achievements in western Pennsylvania. Celebrating its 12th year, the Carnegie Science Awards have honored the accomplishments of more than 200 individuals and organizations that have improved lives through their commitment, courage and contributions.

Randy Pausch went to Capitol Hill on Jan. 23 to help the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) launch its Raise the Cure campaign, which seeks to combine $170 million in federal funding for pancreatic cancer research with $25 million in private funding over three years.

Carnegie Mellon University Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Marcel Just and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell have received a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to pursue new breakthroughs in the science of brain imaging.

Carnegie Mellon University and six other research universities have joined forces with eight historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in a collaborative project to promote robotics and computer science education for African-American students. The Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact (ARTSI) Alliance grew out of a previous collaboration between Andrew Williams, associate professor of computer and information science at Spelman College in Atlanta and David Touretzky, research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, which established robotics education la

Carnegie Mellon Tartan Racing's Boss is in Vegas this week for the giant Consumer Electronics Show and has been garnering attention from the thousands of reporters who annual descend on the show. Viewers of NBC's Today Show on Monday saw weatherman Al Roker climb into Boss' passenger seat, punch a large green button and go for a ride around a parking lot.

A team of U.S., Israeli and German scientists used computational biology techniques to discover 480 genes that play a role in human cell division and to identify more than 100 of those genes that have an abnormal pattern of activation in cancer cells. Malignant cells have lost control of the replication process, so detecting differences in cell cycle gene activation in normal and malignant cells provides important clues about how cancers develop, said Ziv Bar-Joseph, a Carnegie Mellon University computational biologist who led the study.